New robot climbs walls like a super hero

Robots are finding themselves in more and more places these days. From auto factories and manufacturing plants, to mowing lawns and vacuuming floors, there isn’t much, it seems, that robots can’t do. How about climbing walls? Surely robots can’t climb walls, yet. Can they?

{ad}SRI International, a nonprofit research and development institute, has invented a robot that seemingly defies gravity as it effortlessly scales vertically up walls. The trick behind the spider like robot is electro-adhesion. Much like a ballon sticks to a wall after rubbing the balloon on your head, the robot applies an electrostatic charge on the wall surface and up, up, and away it goes.

The SRI climbing robot sticks to a variety of surfaces such as concrete, wood, steel, glass, drywall, and brick using relatively low power. That is good news as the robot can be used for special situations like urban reconnaissance or “search and rescue” operations. The bad news is when robots finally decide to take over the world, there will be no place to hide.